Ordinary Sins. Jim Heynen
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(circa 371 BC to circa 287 BC) may not be the earliest short-short story writer, but he caught my attention in high school where our literature text carried a sampling of his Characters. These brief verbal snapshots of people suited my adolescent attention span, and their appeal stuck with me.
Before Theophrastus, there was nothing quite like his character sketches. We can find some precedent in Homer, Plato, and especially Aristotle. But even in Aristotle’s analysis of moral virtues and vices, the human qualities remain quite abstract. In Theophrastus we see lively, flesh-and-blood people like “The Toady,” who “is the sort of man who says to a person walking with him, ‘Are you aware of the admiring looks you are getting?’” or “The Man of Petty Ambition,” who “is apt to buy a little ladder for his domestic jackdaw and make a little bronze shield for it to carry when it hops onto the ladder” or my favorite, “The Late Learner,” who “is the kind of man who at the age of sixty memorises passages for recitation and while performing at a party forgets the words.”
Most of the biographical information available about Theophrastus was written several centuries after his death by Diogenes Laertius in Lives of the Philosophers. We do know that he studied with Plato and later began to associate with Aristotle in Athens. After Aristotle’s death he became the head of the Lyceum and remained its head until his death at age eighty-five or eighty-six. He inherited Aristotle’s books (which were stored underground and damaged) and may have had as many as two thousand students. He was a learned man and prolific writer, whose works covered a wide expanse of human knowledge, both in science and philosophy. His several-volume work, On the Causes of Plants, for example, prompted some to label him the “father of botany.” I like the fact that his study of plants made him one of Western history’s earliest vegetarians, believing, as he did, that animals have feelings like human beings.
Theophrastus’s given name was Tyrtamus but Aristotle nicknamed him Theophrastus (god/to phrase)—that is, “divine expression”—to acknowledge his graceful way of speaking. Reportedly, he was a fine and witty lecturer, and some scholars speculate that his character portrayals from fourth-century BC Greek society were models for orators.
Was the audience laughing in response to the recitation of Theophrastus’ Characters? Blushing? Insulted? Whatever the answers, I never sense real malice in Theophrastus. I hope the same is true in this collection. In fact, I’d like to think that Theophrastus was gently mocking himself in some of his portrayals. I certainly am in many of the stories in Ordinary Sins, several of which are thinly disguised self-portraits. You are welcome to find Waldo, if you can.
JIM HEYNEN
Note: There is now a six-hundred-page work devoted to these fourth-century BC short-shorts: Theophrastus Characters, edited, commentary, translation and introduction by James Diggle (Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries 43, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Diggle suggests that the title, Characters, is misleading, and could more accurately be Behavioral Types or Distinctive Marks of Character. My quotations are from Diggle’s book.
ORDINARY SINS
This man jingled the change in his pockets.
It was not as if he were generally a fidgeter. He was not running for political office and afraid that his past would be revealed. It was not as if he were being audited by the IRS. He hadn’t just quit smoking. He didn’t have a bleeding ulcer or a bad stock portfolio. He had not forgotten to renew his driver’s license, or homeowners’ insurance, or health insurance, or life insurance, or disability insurance, or car insurance.
Outward appearances said this man had a secure and balanced life. He was ahead in his mortgage payments, just had his teeth cleaned, his lawn fence was in good repair, basement cleaned up, laundry folded, garbage taken out, pets vaccinated, warranties on appliances in order, shingles on his house patched up after the storm, recycling set out on the street the night before the recycling truck would come by, birthdays of his friends and family circled on the calendar, flu shot gotten two weeks before the seasonal outbreak, shoes polished, light bulb in the closet replaced, windshield repaired, oil changed, radiator flushed before winter, crabgrass gotten out of his lawn, tulips planted before the big frost, photographs for the year put safely into an album, workouts at the gym strictly adhered to, thank-you notes sent to the last three dinner hosts, all disagreements with in-laws put to rest, fresh batteries in all the flashlights, toenails clipped and the clippings placed in the wastebasket—and these were just the beginning of what this man had right in his life.
And still he jingled his change, constantly, just jingled and jingled, not even in a comforting rhythm, erratic but constant jingling of change.
And for years people thought she was simply a collector!
That was before they started counting: 550 coffee cups, some in cupboards, some on tables, some on bookshelves, and some dangling on hooks. Bathrobes might be a great comfort on a chilly morning, but twenty-three of them? Eighteen ice cream scoops? And two little teddy bears on every step leading upstairs? Collecting knickknacks is not unusual, but a dozen shoeboxes bulging with tiny owls? And what’s in all the bigger boxes stacked along the walls? You can’t even see out the windows.
By the time it was obvious the hoarder was more than a collector, no one knew what to say. The last person who visited found a narrow path from the front door into the other rooms. Then she stopped allowing visitors because there was no place for them to sit if they did manage to find the path from one room to the next.
The hoarder had enclosed herself with stuff. Teetering stacks and mounting mounds. She was practically smothering herself.
Or was she?
She’s sort of like a caterpillar making a cocoon, someone said.
Single-minded in her mission, she went on filling the remaining gaps bit by bit, knitting herself in tighter—eagerly, like one who was preparing for that glorious warm day when the world would burst open around her and she could fly into the unencumbering sky on wings of many colors.
It was a little wiry dog. A yapper. With big bulging eyes. Not a purebred, just a tiny thing she picked up at the pound when it was the size of a rat. It was the only survivor of a litter of eight, and the mother had died at the pound after delivering. It would have been hard to imagine what the ones that didn’t survive looked like. The woman chose this leftover. She called it Pee-Wee then, and the name stuck.
She took Pee-Wee home from the pound in a shoebox with tissue paper on the bottom. The dog was so small that she wasn’t sure of its sex until Pee-Wee lifted its leg over her two-inch high bronze fireplace cricket.
So you’re my little boy, she said, though gender and size were never factors in this woman’s affection for Pee-Wee.
When Pee-Wee was full-grown—or at least as big as he was likely to get—he was not only a wiry yapper with bulging eyes, he was a shiverer. He yapped and trembled and trembled and yapped, all the while glaring at strangers with his bulging eyes. Pee-Wee had long toenails that clicked like little icicles and scratched the wood floor. When he ran around yapping in a state of great excitement, he had bladder control problems.
Nothing about Pee-Wee bothered this woman. She held his shaking, wiry, yapping tiny body as if he were